Rating: 7.5/10. An epic poem about the Trojan War, comprised of 24 books (about 600 pages), written about 700 BC, it is the oldest piece of western and Greek literature. The Iliad as well as the Odyssey were written by Homer, supposedly a blind poet, but the poems had a long oral history before it…
Category: Classics
Agricola and Germania by Tacitus
Rating: 7.8/10. Fairly short book containing two minor works by Tacitus, a Roman historian who lived in the first century AD. The two works, Agricola and Germania, were written around the same time but on two different topics. Agricola describes the career of the author’s father-in-law, Julius Agricola, a general who conquered Britain and served…
Fortress Besieged (围城) by Qian Zhongshu
Rating: 8.0/10. A classic Chinese novel of the 20th century, set in 1937, a period of chaos and disorder in Chinese history when it was being invaded by the Japanese. The main character, Fang Hongjian, is a student who studied in Europe for a few years but drifted around without earning a degree and ended…
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Rating: 8.3/10. One of the most influential philosophical essays by English philosopher John Stuart Mill, written in 1859 and espousing the values of individual freedom. It has since served as a foundational work for liberalism and many of its principles have been adopted into democratic societies. Mill argues that society tends to force the preferences…
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Rating: 8.5/10. A classic Russian psychological thriller novel, with length about 650 pages and originally published as a 6-part series. The story takes place in 19th century St. Petersburg. Raskolnikov is a poor student, who at the beginning of the novel, murders an old pawnbroker woman with an axe (and her sister too). By sheer…
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Rating: 6.9/10. Novel by libertarian author Ayn Rand, set in New York in the 1920s featuring two young rival architects. The story begins with Howard Roark expelled from his architecture school for his unwillingness to conform to the standards of the establishment; he has a distinct modernist style and refuses to compromise to please others….
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
Rating: 8.2/10. A classic book written in 1962 and a very influential book about the sociology of science. Kuhn describes how science goes through brief periods of revolutions (or paradigm shifts), with longer quieter periods of “normal science” in between. A “paradigm” is a shared set of views in a scientific community about the general…
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Rating: 7.7/10. Written in 1848 in German, this 40-page book is one of the most influential political books ever written. Marx and Engels see society as divided into two classes, the bourgeoisie (people who hire workers and sell the goods) and the proletariat (people who trade their labor for money). The bourgeoisie class arose out…
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anonymous
Rating: 8.7/10. Poem written in Middle English by an anonymous poet in the 14th century. It is about 2500 lines long (90 pages) and is part of the “alliterative revival” — similar to the style of Old English poetry like Beowulf, but in a regional dialect of Middle English. Unlike Chaucer who is from London,…
Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦) by Cao Xueqin
Rating: 7.2/10. One of the four great classic novels of Chinese literature, written in the 18th century. The novel has several English names: it is most commonly known as Dream of the Red Chamber, but also Story of the Stone. It spans 2500 pages over 5 volumes (David Hawkes’s translation), I got through about 200…
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Rating: 8.8/10. Summary Classic American novel by John Steinbeck, set in the Great Depression. It follows the story of the Joad family, originally they owned a farm in Oklahoma, but after crop failures in the dust bowl, they lost their farm. Hearing of greener pastures out west in California, they pack up all their belongings…
The Plague (La Peste) by Albert Camus
Rating: 8.0/10. Novel by philosopher Albert Camus, set in Oran, a town in Algeria, in the 1940s. Very relevant reading in the time of COVID-19: the novel tells of an epidemic of bubonic plague that hits Oran. The style is more philosophical rather than plot driven, and describes the reactions of society and how various…